Young researcher takes UK prize

By
Tuesday, 04 February, 2003

A young researcher in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UNSW has won the Outstanding New Researcher's Award for 2003 from the UK-based Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB). Dr Rob Brooks, 32, will travel to Leeds in April to accept the award, which is given for excellence in research on animal behaviour which "will shape the future of [the] discipline".

Brooks' work is on sex and evolution, particularly how genetic and environmental influences shape attractive displays and mating preferences. Most of his research to date has been in guppies (a type of fish) because they are "small enough to keep thousands in the lab and do breeding experiments, but big enough that you can see them and relate to them".

His growing research group of post-doctoral fellows and postgraduate students is also working on crickets, which now account for more than half the group's research. Both the guppy and the cricket work are supported by the Australian Research Council.

The same evolutionary and genetic theories apply to guppies, crickets and humans, but the species' differences permit different research work. Guppies use colour spots to attract their mates visually whereas crickets use sound. An adult cricket lives for about 30 days, permitting many thousands to be bred in a short time and enabling extensive observations of the energy the male cricket invests in making the mating sound over an entire life span.

Brooks' recent work at UNSW, with collaborators in Finland and at ANU has demolished a hitherto popular dichotomy - that the evolutionary benefits of having attractive sons are different from the benefits of having long-lived or fertile daughters and sons. This work includes a major invited review of the genetic and evolutionary dynamics that underpin mate choice evolution.

Item provided courtesy of UNSW

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